Current Research Interests

Much of my most recent research has been focused on contemporary
issues at the intersections of race and biology, including biomedicine. One
thread of this research surrounds the various approaches to understanding the
genetics of population structure in humans, and how these approaches have
been leveraged into arguments both for and against treating "race "
in humans as biologically real. The hope that contemporary conceptual and
technological advances in biology (e.g., large scale sampling combined with
genomics clustering software) would provide a clear, decisive answer to the "race
question " has proven to be misguided, and grappling with the issues
reveals the ways in which the positions defended are wrapped up in arguments
that extend beyond the science. Much of this work has been pursued in the
context of a very fecund research collaboration with RasmusWinther (University of California, Santa Cruz); we
have so far published three papers together ( "Prisoners of Abstraction?
The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of 'Race. '
" 2013; " Ontologies and Politics of Bio-Genomic 'Race '. "
2014; "Realism, Antirealism, and Conventionalism about Race. "
2015; see abstracts here).

In addition to this work on contemporary biological
practice and arguments surrounding "biologically legitimate "
populations, I have been working on the ways in which "race, " via
social mechanisms that profoundly influence people 's lives and life-chances,
can create biomedically relevant differences
between populations, and how these social mechanisms might influence our
views on social policy (see e.g. " When Socially Determined Categories
Make Biological Realities: Understanding Black/White Health Disparities in
the U.S. " 2010). Race, as a social category, creates biological
differences where, in the absence of the social power of race, there might
have been none. Some of the harms caused by (or associated with) racism and
the legacies of racism can be, and are, reliably transmitted between
generations (via, e.g., maternal imprinting / fetal programming). There are
obvious moral, as well as social and political implications, to the
realization that, even in the absence of new
harms, the harms that have been done (and are still being done!) will have
influences for multiple generations.

I have continued to work on issues surrounding public
health and genetics research, including criticizing attempts to understand
violence as a matter of individual pathology (e.g. "Violence and Public
Health: Exploring the Relationship Between Biological Perspectives on Violent
Behavior and Public Health Approaches to Violence Prevention," 2007) and
exploring the role that genetic research into addiction plays in focusing
attention away from social influences on addiction rates and, again, onto the
individual (e.g. "Personalizing Risk: How Behavior Genetics Research
into Addiction Makes the Political Personal," 2012).

Finally, I continue to work on issues related to the
conceptual foundations of evolutionary biology. My 2006 book, Making Sense of Evolution (co-authored
with Massimo Pigliucci), was focused on those
topics, I continue to work on issues related to that project. For example, I
wrote an article extending the analysis of adaptive landscapes, "The end
of the adaptive landscape metaphor? " (2008), and have published on
arguments surrounding explanations for evolutionary stasis, the relationship
between developmental stability and evolutionary innovations, and the nature
of biological explanations that make use of fitness.